HardFork19 gave smaller accounts more power.
There are lots of people who have gone from having a vote worth nothing or only pennies to almost a dollar or multiple dollars.
In my case, my vote went from being about $.15 to $3.50 at full power (I think. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's close enough to that).
With this newfound power, people are naturally going to upvote themselves, perhaps more than they did when their posts were worth less or nothing. It's only natural: the drive to give yourself some "free money" is strong, and with several votes per day to be doled out, people are perhaps being very greedy or precious about their votes.
I'm going to explore a little bit about what are the advantages and disadvantages of self-voting -- at least as far as I see it.
Self-Voting Blog Posts
When you write a post, you have the option of automatically applying a vote to it.
The box is below the text entry field, on the right side:
This image is like Inception... I'm fixing that spelling error right now.
When checked, your blog post with be accompanied by a full-powered upvote.
PRO: The Tip Jar Effect
It is a well-known fact that if you put money in the tip jar at before the store opens, customers throughout the day are going to be more likely to leave a tip themselves.
This is the psychology of Social Proof: the psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation; so if people see that others are doing something, they're more likely to do it themselves, even if the origins are artificial.
So, by starting out your post with an upvote, you not only give yourself the value of your own vote, you also give your post momentum, because people will be more likely to upvote a post that is making money.
CON: No Curation Rewards
As I understand it, automatically self-voting your blog posts will get you no curation rewards.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but you do not receive curation rewards for upvoting posts that are less than 15 min old, and you receive twice the curation rewards for upvoting posts that are older than 30 minutes.
The sweet-spot for curation is exactly 30 minutes because you get in as early as possible with the maximum amount of potential earnings.
There are some people who like to wait until this mark to upvote their own posts, so they can gain that curation reward.
In all honesty, this isn't going to make a lot of difference unless your post makes more than a hundred dollars, because your portion of the curation pie will be so small that it doesn't supersede the benefit of the tip-jar phenomenon.
Self-Voting Comments
This one is a little iffy.
So, the way that comments are displayed under a blog post is by value: comments can be upvoted, and the more they are worth in dollar amounts, the better placement they have in the comments section, with the most $$$ valuable post at the top.
It is simply a fact that if your vote power has a substantial dollar value, you can leave a comment on a popular blog post and then upvote it and it will get more exposure at the top of the section.
I'm not entirely sure what the cons are in doing this besides organic community perception: other users might think it's unseemly to upvote your own comment for any reason, including getting it placed higher in the comments section.
In any case, this is something that you can do.
My Thoughts
Steemit allows you to upvote your own posts.
There are different approaches you can take, with different advantages and disadvantages, so what you choose to do with this power is completely up to you and what your goals are here on Steemit.
Personally, I like to start my blog posts off with an upvote to get the tip-jar effect. It's true that I usually get a decent amount of votes for my posts, and I could wait until that 30 minute mark to get curation rewards on top of author rewards, but my posts still earn a very modest amount of money per post, so I consider it more worth it to get the tip-jar ball rolling.
If your account is the size of 
What do you think?
Did you learn anything from this post?
Or did you notice all the things that I probably got wrong?
Go ahead and tell me what you think about all the self-voting we are seeing going on after HF19. Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing?
